Mixing Bass Guitar with Softube Bass Amp Room

Today, let’s talk about bass guitars and I’m just going to kind of show you what I did with this guitar. This is a session — kind of an indie rock kind of a thing. Here’s a chunk of the tune, here’s what it sounds like.

[mix]

Alright. Now bass guitars, I pretty much always DI them. I always do it. I’ve got — I use an outboard DI, I’m not using anything on my interface. I don’t know why I do it, it’s just how I do it. Call me lazy, call me whatever you want, but I always DI my guitars.

Now that’s to say, different DIs are going to give you different kind of sounds. So for like, Pop and R&B stuff I may use an Avalon, because that’s just one of those things those guys will like to use. It just sounds good in that music.

But there’s also the Neve stuff, the API stuff, they all have different flavors and different sounds to them. Let me show you what it sounds like. So just straight DI into the interface.

[bass guitar DI]

You’ve got no EQ, no anything. But with this song, we want it to be a little fatter. Like, here’s what that sounds like in the track.

[mix]

Which sounds alright, but you can always make it better. So I got this new plug-in, and I’ve been playing with it for a couple of days. It’s by SofTube, and they make three different versions. This is the bass amp room. They also make a metal amp room and a vintage amp room.

But anyways, this is the bass one. It’s pretty cool, you flip between a couple different — like a big tall Ampeg thing, then we’ve got this 4×12, and we’ve got this old vintage tiny thing.

It’s kind of broken up into three sections. The top section are going to be amp controls, so you’ve got high and low, your normal volume going in, you’ve got bass, we’ve got mids, trebles, master volume, all stuff you’ve seen before in the amp.

And below you have the room where you can cycle between your amps. Just click and drag. Then you’ve got — you can click on the microphone and so you can get more room sound or you can get closer and you can ever angle the mic. You have all of these options in between, which is pretty freaking cool I think.

I’ve been searching for something like this for bass for awhile and this is one I’m really happy with. So let’s listen to some of these subtle changes. I’ll solo this track.

[bass guitar]

Yeah, there you go.

So yeah, you’ve got the DI amp balance slider that’ll let you blend between DI signal and the amp signal. Then it’s got this DI shaping section right here. You’ve got you know, a low cut, so you’re going to cut everything below whatever frequency. You also have a tone knob, which would go from fat to thin, which sounds like this. We’ll set this back up, like right there.

[bass guitar]

Half way through.

Thin.

Back to fat.

So if you really want to get some body out of your bass, this is a really cool, easy way to do it. Then of course we have a hi-cut, because that’s important too. Got to get rid of some of that high stuff that you don’t want to interfere with anything else in your track.

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Then it’s got a limiter on it. You can crank that and slam it or whatever you need to do, then it’s got a big output knob.

So anyways, I used — I usually start with a preset and then kind of tweak away. So here’s where we started again, just for reference.

[bass guitar DI]

Alright, and here’s where we are with the SofTube bass amp room plug-in.

[bass guitar]

Bypassed.

With the plug-in.

You know, and I’ll slide the — because I don’t want full DI, so I’ll slide it back, because you get kind of that top end kind of speaker-y kind of sound in it.

Then after that I just through a Sonnox, one of these Oxford EQs, and used some filtering up to 50Hz, and then down to about 4kHz or so on the top end.

I will say this. With filters, this is a side note, lower frequencies, I’ll be a little more harsh with my shelves. I typically won’t really go any more than like, 12dB per octave.

With my higher frequencies, my high filters, I usually like gentler curves because high frequencies cut a little more and they can get a little more harsh, so you can be a little more gentle and a little more transparent with them, and things usually work out a little better.

So that’s that. Inside note. Let’s listen to the original — we’ll solo everything in the track, and then I’ll go back and forth between the processed and the unprocessed bass so you can hear the difference.

So here’s unprocessed.

[mix]

Right. Here’s with the plug-ins on.

[mix]

Off.

On.

So yeah, it gets a little deeper, it gets a little fatter. Go check them out. SofTube makes a lot of really cool stuff. I really dig their plug-ins a lot.

Like the video, subscribe, keep coming back. We’ve got more videos on the way. Hit me up on Twitter if you have any questions, feel free to hit me up. I try my best to get back to people.

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Anyways, I hope you guys have a great week and we’ll see you next time.